3TB seagate external, secure erase failing

[jterp7]

I have the setup below, with a 3tb seagate connected through FW800. With all the weird errors that happened during backup of my pc, I've decided to return it and use the 2.5" drives that I have instead. On two ocassions the erase has failed, both with the 1 pass through disk utility on 10.7.3.

Are there any other options besides this? I've searched but on the oct 2011 thread, there was no solution.

 

[Lennyvalentin]

You can simply do a full format of the device, this will overwrite all sectors on the drive. There's also software programs out there that will fill up a drive with random junk, although that's overkill with today's harddrives. They pack information so densely that once you overwrite it it's essentially gone for good.

A top of the line forensics lab might be able to extract data from a drive that's been overwritten once, or maybe even a few times, but at enormous expense so it's so unlikely to cause you any concern whatsoever. If you have top secret infos that nobody must under any circumstances get their paws on EVER, I suggest you simply take a hammer to the drive instead and buy a new one.*

Paranoia is never a good thing.

* = Please remember to recycle your harddrive debris properly.

 

[jterp7]

if it was old I'd probably destroy it physically, but since this is being returned it's not really an option.

At this point I connected it to my pc and will do it manually that way. It seems to be related to sleep even though mba was set to not sleep it seemed to occur whenever the display slept (TBD), and I didn't intend to leave the display on all day whenever the HD was being used.

You can simply do a full format of the device, this will overwrite all sectors on the drive. There's also software programs out there that will fill up a drive with random junk, although that's overkill with today's harddrives. They pack information so densely that once you overwrite it it's essentially gone for good.

A top of the line forensics lab might be able to extract data from a drive that's been overwritten once, or maybe even a few times, but at enormous expense so it's so unlikely to cause you any concern whatsoever. If you have top secret infos that nobody must under any circumstances get their paws on EVER, I suggest you simply take a hammer to the drive instead and buy a new one.*

Paranoia is never a good thing.

* = Please remember to recycle your harddrive debris properly.